Massacre at Mountain Meadows | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Glen M. Leonard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 29769
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0195160347
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.202
EAN: 9780195160345
ASIN: 0195160347
Publication Date: August 19, 2008
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Product Description
On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an expose, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON MOUNTAIN MEADOWS January 3, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The scholarship and objectivity is first-rate. The source material is so much greater than what was previously available to other authors. This is the definitive book on Mountain Meadows without a question.
Brings out the true horror of the massacre December 26, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I grew up as a Mormon in Utah and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was always portrayed as a dark spot in Utah and Mormon history. I remember trying to figure out how something like this could happen. I recall various people trying to justify the participants' actions and others trying to make it sound like a big conspiracy with Brigham Young behind the whole thing. I never felt good about either extreme and have wanted to read a balanced view of the whole thing. I had Juanita Brooks book on my list of books to read, but never got around to it. This book came out and my son gave me a copy to read and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted to learn more about the massacre.
The book is 430 pages long, but only 231 pages are the actual text; the rest of the pages are appendices, indexes, and endnotes. Obviously, the book is well researched and documented. The authors had unlimited access to church records; which helped them reconstruct what actually happened. Generally, when I read a scholarly work, I like to go through the footnotes as I read, but I followed the advice of the authors and just worked my way through the text to get the smooth flow of the story. That method worked very well; I did work my way through the appendices and endnotes after I had read everything and learned a lot more.
My reaction to the book was one of horror. The way the events unfolded did put the thing in perspective, but it is still hard to believe that things could have gotten to that point. The people involved in the massacre were normal people that ended up doing something dreadful. The authors did discuss some psychological research of how massacres happen and it shows that this fits the mold. It also shows how truly bad cover-ups are; something very bad happened, but the attempt at covering it up made it orders of magnitude worse.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The authors do an excellent job summarizing the events up to and including the massacre. I look forward to the follow up book explaining more on what happened after the massacre.
 High Hopes Met with Disappointment December 15, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
With all the hype that this book received before publication, I had high hopes for it but found myself disappointed. While new material was uncovered, particularly the Andrew Jensen interviews with many of the murderers, they add little or nothing to what we already knew. Equally disappointing was the authors nuanced treatment of Brigham Young's responsibility. While emphasizing that the Prophet didn't order the massacre, a reasonable conclusion, they only addressed his acknowledged complicity in creating the environment that allowed this to happen, in the most general terms. This stands in stark contrast to their harsh and very specific blame of leaders in Southern Utah (who, incidentally, are almost always referred to with their military titles rather than their ecclesiastical titles.)
Especially disappointing was the brief treatment of the influence of the violent rhetoric of Church officials during the "reformation" of 1857 and complete omission of the "oath to avenge the death of the prophets" as if these were insignificant.
I was astonished at the authors repeated assertion that their book was not written to respond to Will Bagley's "Blood of the Prophets." The notion that Mountain Meadows Massacre would be the highest priority for the several million dollars of Church money spent on this research while the Joseph Smith Papers languished for lack of funding just doesn't make sense unless someone at very high levels didn't want Bagley to have the last word.
I agree with an earlier reviewer's comment that it would have been better for the authors to put the end notes on the internet and provide us with the whole story instead of making us wait (I'm told it will be years) for Volume II.
Bottom line is that though well researched, there's nothing new in terms of conclusions that Juanita Brooks didn't tell us over 50 years ago.
It's done. Anything else on the subject can be, at most, an appendix to this book. November 26, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
It's easy to read and it's hard to read. But most of all, it's worth the read.
By nature, I'm not very interested in history. I'm a Mormon, a technologist, and the great-great-great grandson of John D. Lee. I was also privileged to contribute in some tiny measure to the production of this book.
I just finished reading the final result this morning, and I must say that I am in awe at the paragon of dedication, effort and frank truthfulness that the book epitomizes. You want sources and details? A massive swath of endnotes and appendices takes up almost half of the book!
Yet without becoming a tome or even a volume, it gives enough background to set the stage. You learn who these people were and the world that they lived in. You see how the cascade of events and seemingly small choices early on culminated in a disaster that still echoes loudly around the world. Finally, in graphic detail, you must bear mute witness to the grisly deaths of more than a hundred souls.
I don't cry easily, but I am not ashamed of my tears as I read and pondered. If humanity has any hope of learning from its mistakes, Massacre at Mountain Meadows has a lesson for us.
An engaging and compelling history of a terrible crime and tragedy November 25, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you want to understand what happened on those awful days at Mountain Meadows in September 1857, I recommend this book above all others. Juanita Brooks' books are still very good and she should always be admired for the work she did in telling this story and this event and providing a biography of John D. Lee. But this book presents information she did not have access to and provides many helpful illustrations, maps, photos, and notes that help us as readers. The authors do not debate other versions of this event and if you want to believe that Brigham Young ordered this slaughter, you will not like the evidence presented here. However, neither John D. Lee, any of the contemporary participants, Juanita Brooks, or these authors implicates Brigham Young. The authors do show the extraordinary pressure put on John D. Lee by the non-Mormon judicial system that tried and executed him to point the finger at Young, but he did not do so.
What I think is especially helpful about this book is the way the authors never once try to make excuses for the horrors committed against the immigrants while also providing a context for this nightmare. Not to make excuses or to spread blame, but to show the full chain of events. We all know that horrible events such as plane crashes are rarely the result of one big failure, but the sum of many small things going wrong. If any one of them is caught and dealt with properly, the tragedy is averted. Nothing can excuse the massacre of the emigrants. Nothing can make it understandable in any rational way. But the context helps us see the chain of events that contributed to, used as an excuse, and exploited in order to justify the initial attack.
I was fascinated by the way the authors handled the charge of the emigrants poisoning a dead ox and thereby killing local people and Indians. If it was anthrax, as the authors posit, it explains a lot and since it was not understood at the time it would appear to be the work of the emigrants and seem to "justify" some kind of retribution or extraction of payment. However, the Indians did not cause the attack. They were also exploited and manipulated by the Cedar City leaders, especially Lee. Then there was the murder of several members of the party who were seeking assistance from nearby folks to save their party from the Indian attack. Once those murders occurred, the final slaughter was an attempt to cover up the original attack and murders. Reading this story is like being trapped in a nightmare you want to wake up from, but can't.
While we can't undo this tragic horror, we can learn from it. Here is an example of people committing wrongs and then seeking to cover them up with more crime. Here are events that burden us more than a century and a half after they happened. The final butchery took only a few minutes and yet will never end. I also appreciate the way the authors undermine the pride of those who say they did not participate in the crimes; however, the authors note, which of them stood up to Dame, Haight, Lee, and others in any attempt to stop the killing? That is our requirement. We must stand up to wrong and not merely stand apart and feel innocent.
This book covers the context and the crime, but not much of the aftermath (except for what happened to the children not murdered and the execution of Lee at the Meadows in 1877) , which the authors say should be its own book. I hope they write that book. While this book is 430 page long, the actual telling of the story is only 231 pages. The rest contains appendices listing all the emigrants, their property (that the killers coveted), the names of those involved in the murders, the Indians involved, sources, 127 pages of footnotes (very helpful reading, by the way), and an index.
Frankly, I wept more than a few times in working my way through this book. I do not see how anyone could read this history without becoming deeply engaged as these terrible events unfold.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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